Well, the middle class left the ghetto and that, of course, was their right, perhaps even their obligation. But for the kid in the Underclass, today’s role models are a harder sort: crack dealers, pimps, stickup men. In spite of a tentative move toward gentrification in places such as Harlem, bad guys are the only visible symbols of black success. There is no stigma to welfare. Even prison holds no terrors; it functions as part of a puberty rite, the institution where the bad blades and homeboys receive their higher educations on their way to early graves.
You ask the immemorial question: What is to be done?
There are no simple answers. We are seeing the culmination of fifty years of American history, the consequences of some social policies that succeeded and many that failed. The Underclass has been a long time forming, since about the time that the great black migration to the North began during and after World War II. This was caused by the mechanization that changed the economy of the South; where once a hundred black men toiled in a cotton field, now there was one machine and ten men and all the others were heading north. But when they arrived in places like New York and Chicago, they soon discovered that there might be jobs at Young & Rubicam, but not any were for men and women who’d spent their lives chopping cotton. By the late 1950s, the jobs that supported my father and other European immigrants began to vanish, too, jobs in small factories, jobs that didn’t require much formal education. Soon welfare became the dismal alternative to all those glittering visions of renewal. Soon despair was general.
I would like to see the black middle class return in great waves to the urban ghettos to attack the roots of that despair and to work at the restoration of genuine pride and lost dignity. I am speaking here of you and your friends, of course, along with all those younger than you, the bright young men and women with their M.B.A.’s and BMWs. Obviously, I don’t mean that you must move your family back to the ghetto. Or that your friends should do the same. That simply isn’t going to happen in the immediate future. But in important ways, such a drastic commitment isn’t necessary. After all, back in the 1950s, it wasn’t necessary for the freedom riders to live permanently in the South, either. But just as the sit-ins and freedom rides were directed from the North against the institutions of the segregated South, this campaign would come from the outside, from the suburbs, from downtown, and yes, from the South.
It would help to consider the Underclass as a Third World country within the borders of a First World nation. Members of the black middle class are now citizens of that First World country. But if Bob Geldof can help Ethiopia, you and other suburban and downtown blacks can surely help those who’ve been left behind in the Third World. To begin with, you could mount the most widespread private literacy campaign in the history of this country, drawing on the experiences of Cuba and Nicaragua, utilizing all the skills you have gained in the wider world of business, communications, journalism, marketing. You could force Eddie Murphy to make some TV commercials about the importance of reading, thus redeeming himself for once bragging to Barbara Walters that he never reads (given the nature of the catastrophe in the black Underclass, this was surely the most disgusting single public statement by a black man in the past decade). You could publicly destroy a hundred or so TV sets to symbolize the need for the Underclass to remove itself from the hypnotic glow of the tube and begin functioning again as active participants in life instead of as a passive audience.
You could teach black teenagers about birth control — clearly, graphically, intelligently — and then supply birth-control devices to everyone. You could make clear to young black men that they aren’t men at all if they abandon their women and children. You could instruct young women that when they make the momentous decision to have a child, they must be prepared to support it for the rest of their days and not leave that awesome task to the state. You could demand through lawsuits, demonstrations, sheer moral force, and the use of the media that the police round up the crack dealers and smack peddlers. These vicious bastards should then be tried and jailed, instead of being sent back to the streets where they smirk at the impotence of the law and wink at the unwary young. This would require cooperation with the police and an end to the incessant knee-jerk portrayal of the police as the enemy.
But your main target should be the welfare system. This seems to an outsider the single most degrading and corrupting fact of life in the Underclass, and the goal should be its virtual destruction. Human beings must work. It is as necessary to life as food and drink, sex and rest. You would have to stop the nonsense about “dead-end” jobs. There are no “dead-end” jobs for people who want to make something of their lives. When I was a kid I worked as a messenger, a delivery boy, a bank teller, a lowly assistant in an advertising agency’s art department, a sheet-metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I didn’t make a career of any of those jobs, but they taught me how to work. That is, they taught me how to get up in the morning when I wanted to sleep another few hours. They taught me how to perform tasks that didn’t personally interest me. They taught me how to understand the needs of other people and their expectations of me. I say this as a man of the Left, knowing that the dogmatists will accuse me of collaborating with the neocons and other dogmatists of the Right. I can only answer that social justice must be based on work, not welfare. To demand the expansion of the welfare system, instead of its elimination, is to consign the Underclass to permanent darkness.
Where would the jobs come from? Obviously, many of them at the beginning would have to come from the government. There is an extraordinary amount of work to be done in the United States, repairing the collapsing physical infrastructure of streets, bridges, highways. This is work that does not require a high school education. In every major city, in those places where the Underclass resides, there are hundreds of abandoned buildings, structurally sound but gutted by fire; they could be reclaimed through the use of sweat equity, converted into condominiums for a resurgent black and Hispanic working class. The current generation might never be able to enter the high-tech world of the modern service industries, but they can work, men and women alike, with the sweat of their backs and the power of their hands to make certain that their children will be able to function in the twenty-first century. The money now being wasted on welfare could be used for the creation of jobs; if that is called “workfare,” so be it. You must start somewhere.
The time to begin is now. Waiting will only worsen the disaster. You cannot, for example, wait for a day-care system to be created; somehow my mother raised seven kids and worked all her days; my father lost a leg in his twenties and kept on working. They didn’t have day-care centers. They didn’t take welfare, either. Too busy for self-pity. They had no more advantages than anyone else (my mother arrived as an immigrant the day the stock market crashed in 1929), unless you insist that being white was some immense privilege. If it was, it did them no good. All they knew was that in America, they would have to work.
In the best of all possible worlds, of course, the federal government would help fund this immense project, including the building of day-care centers. To say that the richest nation on earth can’t afford this is ludicrous. As just one example, they could scrap the idiotic Star Wars program and use that trillion dollars (over ten years) to guarantee full employment, even at the risk of fueling inflation. Jobs are everything. A job for one man could take four people off the dole. Jobs would take more pistols out of the hands of young men than another hundred thousand police. Any sensible citizen knows that the Underclass is a greater threat to our national security than the Russians. The Russians aren’t killing people on the streets of our cities. They aren’t spreading AIDS. They aren’t presiding over the deaths of American infants.